I don't even know where to start

As much as I would like to read everyone else's savage takedown of the Oscars, I have to write my own first so I am not stealing everybody else's thoughts. And even though it's after midnight on a day when I drove three hours and woke up at 4:15 a.m., I have to write this shit now.

What a terrible Oscars.

I really don't know where to start, but let's start with this stupid crap where Frances McDormand was howling like a wolf.

I didn't like Nomadland very much -- I gave it three stars, but I now think that's generous. In the four months since I watched it I have liked it less and less, and watching Frances McDormand win her third Oscar -- actually fourth since she was a producer on Nomadland -- put the cherry on top of this rapidly curdling sundae. 

The main reason I started with it, though, was to explain the picture. Come to think of it, you don't need the picture explained. You saw the show just like I did.

The real place to start is with Chadwick Boseman not winning the posthumous Oscar everyone on the planet knew he was going to win -- if not because he died, then because he deserved it. He acted the shit out of that role. So did Anthony Hopkins, mind you, and he also deserves an Oscar. But not this year. 

So then also: They didn't give out best picture last.

Wot?

That would seem to be the one sacrosanct element of the show. But I guess they really wanted to blow things up. If it's sort of broke, break it a lot worse. 

Presumably Steven Soderbergh and the other producers thought that Boseman was going to win best actor, so they finished with best actor. When Boseman didn't win best actor, and Hopkins didn't give a damn about the award so did not even appear on camera on his couch in England or wherever he might be, the show just ended with an abrupt thud. Joaquin Phoenix seemed to have gotten wind of this, so instead of lauding the other nominees as all the other presenters had been doing all night, he just rushed through the names as quickly as possible.

The whole night was about rushing through, in a sense -- except when they paused at the precipice of completion to give Lil Rel Howery the latitude for an ill-conceived bit that was designed to end with Glenn Close shaking her rump. It was a bit that Questlove signed off on, where he'd play a bit of a song and Howery asked someone in the audience whether it was a nominee, a winner, or neither. The apparent purpose of this, other than the Close rump shaking, was to give Andra Day the chance to show her withering disdain at the racist past of the Oscars for not nominating "Purple Rain" for an Oscar. Good thing Close was game, as she couldn't have been in a great mood after yet again not winning an Oscar. (We won't argue the merits of Hillbilly Elegy, but I think we can agree this was a good opportunity to give a career achievement award to her, instead of honoring an admittedly great performance from Minari by an actress most people have never heard of, even though she's a national treasure in South Korea.)

Moving around as fluidly as I can at 12:20 a.m., marking 20 straight hours of being awake, Youn Yuh-jung's acceptance speech was easily one of my favorite parts of the evening, as she was disarming and self-deprecating and incredibly charming in her quite good attempt at speaking a language she has never had to speak professionally. But the highlights of this evening were few.

Before there were about a dozen terrible shocks in the show's final 15 minutes, I was all set to lead this piece talking about the horrible set. Horrible. Maybe not a bad idea to set the Oscars in Union Station -- I suppose an attempt to be a great equalizer between famous actors and the common man -- but boy did it look ugly. The dark blue curtain behind the stage clashed with just about every outfit, and the blinding sun coming through the windows lent the whole thing the bleary air of a still-drunk partyer on a walk of shame. My wife pointed out that they couldn't even get anyone to shoot the thing with even a small eye toward making it look nice.

The whole evening was disjointed and flat, but maybe the saddest moment was the In Memoriam section. One of the most hallowed Oscars traditions went by at breakneck speed, as most names had less than a second on screen for you to come to grips with who they were before the next name replaced it. It was like the way they used to run the credits really fast when a movie played on TV in order to cram them in before the next show started at the top of the hour. It was an absolute disgrace.

Just because it's tradition I will conclude with some isolated thoughts:

- I didn't mind that they did an opening credits listing the "stars" of this telecast -- a.k.a. the presenters -- at least in concept. But one of the joys of watching an Oscars show is to be surprised by who might come on stage next. This completed ruined that.

- I noticed early on that Questlove was not going to play anyone off stage like the orchestra always does. Some of those people needed to be played off.

- I loved Florian Zeller's wife coming in to kiss his shoulder after he thanked her upon winning best adapted screenplay, in the middle of the night in France. I needed a lot more moments like that.

- The Oscars voiceover person introduced herself. I thought that was sort of funny.

- I noticed I was pouring a glass of wine during Thomas Vinterberg's acceptance speech for Another Round. Very appropriate. That was a win I was happy with. I didn't know his daughter had died while he was making the movie. Sad.

- Lakeith Stanfield looks good with blonde hair.

- I have never before heard Daniel Kaluuya's real speaking voice. Has he ever played a character who is not American? Or Wakandan?

- Chloe Zhao's win for best director represented one of the only times in my history watching the Oscars where I've had an award spoiled before I started watching. I forgot I was avoiding spoilers today at work and happened across that one. I liked her speech and I was surprised to learn that she is basically western, having grown up in England. I thought part of her outsider appeal was that she was living in China until recently. Anyway, I could get behind that win even if I don't care for the movie. The Rider was amazing.

- Pete Docter stepped in it a little, I thought, when he referenced the "cultural consultants" that had helped them make Soul. I wouldn't say it sounded defensive but it seemed like a response to some of the criticism that film has received on its handling of racial issues.

- Marlee Matlin looks way younger than 55.

- I may not love all his movies but I love Tyler Perry. I liked that he said that change comes in the middle. That was actually a really daring thing to say. He was basically suggesting compromise, which is not what most people might have thought he should have said. But he said it with conviction.

- I liked seeing two of "my guys" accepting an award together. You know Trent Reznor is my guy because I've written about him about a half dozen times on this blog. You may not know that Jon Batiste is my guy because I haven't written about The Late Show with Stephen Colbert being one of the things my wife and I watched most consistently in the lead-up to the election. Batiste is Colbert's band leader and he is a constant ray of sunshine. I thought Trent could have at least said "Thanks" but it was certainly the right choice to let Batiste take the lead there. Trent already has an Oscar anyway. (Sorry, Atticus Ross, but I can't quite call you "my guy," even though you've collaborated with Trent for 20 years or more.)

Just because I liked a couple moments does not mean that this show wasn't awful. It was awful.

I guess a lot of people will laud the Academy for being on point with its best picture winner for a second year in a row after Parasite, but not me. Nomadland is overdetermined, has way too many moments overtly saturated with significance, and has a really manipulative score, and I'm tired of Frances McDormand howling like a wolf, figuratively and literally. She now has as many acting Oscars as Daniel Day-Lewis.

On to the next one. 

Is it in this land?

I was on about titles yesterday, and now I'm on about titles again today.

(Incidentally, do you like how the way I think is becoming more Australian? Instead of saying "What are you talking about?" Australians say "What are you on about?")

This is one of those superficial posts where I make an observation about four similar contemporaneous movie titles -- which is also kind of like yesterday. But I wouldn't be writing the post at all if it didn't allow me to recount a story from my youth, one of those moments you remember because something you said got everybody laughing.

First the banal observation: There are four movies either out in theaters now, or very soon, whose title structure is "_____land." The titles are Greenland, Nomadland, Dreamland and Summerland.

Now, the story.

I was on a school trip to Canada and we went to this cheap-o amusement park, which Canadians probably thought was great, but which struck us as lame by comparison, as New England had a couple really good amusement parks when I was growing up. They might seem terrible now (I'm not even sure if they still exist), but at the time, they were a hell of a lot of fun. This one was not.

The park was segmented into "lands," and I'm sure these weren't their actual names, but for example, they had "Forestland" or "Arcticland" or "Sandland." In fact, if any of those were the actual names I'd be very surprised, as I don't even remember what the park's overarching theme was. But you get the idea. 

Some friends and I were looking for a bathroom or an ATM or a gift shop or whatever. (Did they have ATMs when I was that age? Did I have any money?) So we went up to one of the people who worked at the park to ask directions to something, which he was not giving us very clearly.

In an effort to cut through his waffling instructions, I asked, "Is it in this land?"

My friends cracked up and even the employee was stifling guffaws. He was someone who seemed to value his professionalism, so it was all the more telling.

After I originally posted this, I realized it may not be clear why everyone thought this was so funny. So at the risk of ruining a joke to explain why it's funny, it was something about the way I said it. It was kind of like "Is it in this LAND?" So I was essentially taking this silly convention they'd established to segment their park -- which everyone knew was silly -- and using their own terminology to cut to the core of what I wanted to ask. Anyway, I was hailed a comedic genius in the moment. 

Was it worth writing this post just so I could tell you this story? You be the judge.

Okay so I'll also at least talk about how excited I am to see Nomadland, Chloe Zhao's new movie, which may have the most critical acclaim of any movie released this year. (And it's actually getting released this year, thank God, not debuting in January or February to take advantage of the extended Oscar deadline. It's opening at Cinema Nova on Christmas, anyway, even if IMDB doesn't have it opening until February in either Australia or the U.S. If any year is a year not to trust the IMDB release dates, it's probably 2020.)

Anyway, I was a huge fan of Zhao's The Rider, which rounded out my top ten of that year. This seems to be getting more hyped than that was, which maybe isn't a big statement, since that film wasn't all that widely seen. (It did earn her a gig as director of a Marvel movie, though.)

I wasn't as big of a fan of Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Yada Yada Yada, and just from appearances this might find her in a similar mode. But I can get past that.

Greenland is a new disaster movie starring Gerard Butler. There are meteors showering from the sky in the poster. 'Nuff said.

I don't know anything about Dreamland or Summerland. Okay, Margot Robbie is in Dreamland, which looks on IMDB like a sort of generic mid-century period piece. Though this is certainly an interesting tagline: "A teenager's adventures as a bounty hunter take an unexpected twist." I would have thought the teenager being a bounty hunter was the unexpected twist. 

Summerland stars the always interesting Gugu Mbatha-Raw and the always uninteresting Gemma Arterton, and that averages out to a semi-interesting period piece -- also mid-century -- synopsized thusly: "During World War II, an Englishwoman opens her heart to an evacuee after initially resolving to be rid of him in this moving journey of womanhood, love and friendship."

I'll be at Nomadland on one of its first nights out, but as for the other three, I might give them a miss. 

Yep, still trying out those Australian phrases.

If you are an actual Australian reading this, you can see Dreamland in cinemas now, Nomadland at Christmas and Summerland on January 7th. 

According to IMDB, Greenland came to Australia on August 13th, but I don't remember that happening, though I must say our cinemas here in Victoria were closed at that time. It might have played in the other states. It just got released in the U.S. on Friday on HBO Max, in any case.